


Spare Parts

by RegentOfTheAuxArcs



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alien Gender/Sexuality, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Based on a Tumblr Post, Because of course he does, Canon Disabled Character, Dathomir, Difficult Decisions, Force Lore, Force Visions, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Gender Issues, Other, Past Abuse, Past Relationship(s), Physical Disability, Sith Shenanigans, The Dark Side of the Force, Trans Character, Transitioning, fuck terfs, maul has a to-murder list
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-11 00:17:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15960650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RegentOfTheAuxArcs/pseuds/RegentOfTheAuxArcs
Summary: theladyvalkyrieskyeartRe-watching Visions and Voices…I find it interesting that he refers to the Nightsisters as “His People” and not the Nightbrothers. Does he align himself as a Nightsister despite him being a man? If they were still alive, would they welcome him into the tribe?Maul has...A Lot To Unpack Here to say the least.





	Spare Parts

**Author's Note:**

> As a trans person with an intersex condition...that note in the summary seemed really interesting and maybe a little weird? It's not something I'd really considered before, but the post is right, that's how it went.

Since not having to worry about anything from his waist down for so long, Maul had time to entertain plenty of thoughts about missing parts, autonomy, and what it all meant when Mother rebuilt his legs.

He’d spent so much time being a hand of the Emperor, Sith Lord, Spider-King of Mount Trash…he never really had time to be himself. Himself was a strange concept. It was hard enough to grapple with a newly-sound mind in his different body, but the idea that he was made in his own image was harder to grapple with still.  
Himself. What even was that anymore?

He looked at his reflection in the wellspring and wondered. The first part of his rebuild was complete and his new legs were satisfactory. Granted, they were steel frames and not as shapely as they had been before, but it was better than odds and ends tinkered into his nerves. He thought about the rest of the rebuild, which would be considerably more complicated. He hadn’t thought about the genitals he was born with in almost thirteen years and it was weird to think about them now. His system adapted to the drastically shortened intestines, his bladder remained intact, function restored with some tubing as sanitized as he could manage in Mount Trash. I mean, it all worked okay as it was. If they could install something medically sound that wouldn’t keep getting grit and dirt involved and continue to work the same way it did, fine. The rest depended entirely on whether he cared about sexual function and aesthetics. He’d be recovering from this leg of the procedure for about four weeks, so a decision wasn’t needed immediately. He could probably get by for a while not thinking about these parts and that was perfectly fine as well. He waved his hand through the water, ripples disrupting the reflection. Those thoughts could go right back where they were before, thank-you-very-much.

But they didn’t quit.

Sith don’t form attachments. Aside from his brother and mother, neither did Maul. Knowing there was such a small population left from the attempted genocide didn’t really change his feelings on the matter—he was never interested in breeding. That’s all it was: inserting a tab into a slot until everything finished uploading. Being the tab in the situation held no appeal, other than a brief period of physical pleasure. It wasn’t like he hadn’t had sex before; he had. It just wasn’t exactly at the top of his list of priorities. It wasn’t really even in the middle. He was perfectly fine not worrying about it at all, if he were being honest. Which, alone in his room, meditating, he could. For such a long time, his thoughts and feelings weren’t his own, and often weren’t private. Now that they were, all it caused was discomfort. He’d imagined that away from his old master and in his birthplace where there were neither Jedi nor Sith, he’d feel some kind of freedom, but none came. It was a different kind of chain and as much as the Sith had burned him, he still disliked tethers of any kind. He was born and raised a man and didn’t know anything different. Horns, flat chest, angular body, penis. It was all pieces of the machine that he thought of as the physical body. It wasn’t like it didn’t feel right, it just didn’t feel like much of anything at all, and there was the problem. It should feel like something, he thought. He should be able to view himself with something other than indifference. He was no longer a tool, but still wasn’t sure what that meant. He no longer belonged to Sidious. He was his own person. 

Now if he could just figure out what he wanted to do with himself (other than a short list of murders, of course) that would make all of this easier.

Mother didn’t pressure him one way or another after rebuilding his legs and he recovered well from it. She didn’t want to start this rebuilding without his permission, and since he had a chance to decide for himself, she thought he would want some say in it. The way she saw it, the gods had given him a rare opportunity to mold himself into precisely what he wanted, which considering how much time and autonomy had been taken from him, was a special gift. She had assumed he enjoyed the physical aspects of the Horned God—he embodied all of them—but it wasn’t her will.   
He wasn’t so certain anymore that it was his, either.

Once again, his thoughts turned to the dwindling population of Dathomir. So few had escaped the Night of the Lightning (as it had come to be called), but more Nightbrothers remained than Nightsisters. The Sisters were the focus of Sidious’ wrath; it was them that guarded the secrets of the Green Force and his own Mother that defied him. The planet was out of balance, he could feel that much, and every night that he spent in recovery, he meditated on the state of things. He was sure that the Force, both the greater sense of it and the odd little pocket that was Dathomir, would guide him. 

He'd spent enough time with Mother to know that dreams could be prophetic and being Force-sensitive, he could have them. More than once during the recovery time, he’d woken up sweating and panicked, ready to fight ghosts that may or may not have actually been in the room with him. But there were a few times that he dreamed of the wellspring, walking to it with a very wrong center of gravity, slipping down into the waters, being surprised at the state of his body on the way in. He’d never been overweight in his life (Sidious made sure he stayed at his physical peak), but in these dreams, he was physically perfect down to his ribs, from there, his belly protruded almost perfectly round in front and heavy. In these dreams, his legs were intact, but he could never get a sense of anything else. It was troubling. 

There would be life after he finished exacting revenge and he thought these dreams were trying to tell him something, it just wasn’t clear what. Mother had kept track of Sidious when he left, and hunting him down wouldn’t be difficult. Sidious was surely still an arrogant bastard. Maul was sure he didn’t perceive his former assassin to be a threat anymore, particularly after the level of damage his body sustained after Mount Trash. It was extremely satisfying thinking of all the creative and terrible things he’d do once he finally got his mark, but there was still the empty space of what came after. He supposed he’d return home and try to adjust to life as it would have gone, had he not been taken. The Sith meant nothing anymore. The Empire was his enemy. The Jedi weren’t any better. He could count on the loyalty and community of the Nightpersons and that was pretty much it.

It was all one big, annoying circle.  
But this wasn’t something that could wait any longer. Any day now, Mother would find him and expect him to know how to finish rebuilding himself. Maul still didn’t know how to answer.

After another night of dreaming about the spring, he decided to go to the source and try to clear his head. Maybe there was something there he missed, a bit of the record on the wall he should have seen, some detail he’d missed. Maybe there was an unseen threat.

He fought with pants for a bit and getting steady on his feet, then went off to the spring.

Once inside, he felt the familiar pang of “something wrong”, but still couldn’t put words to it. He scanned the walls—the figures of the Nightpersons who came before. He deliberately studied the panel where Sidious came the first time, looking for any detail he might have missed, anything that could be altered, and found nothing. It was always surreal, seeing Sidious holding the small red ball that was him. At the bottom of that panel was Mother, in red, obviously grieving. He’d never know that feeling—grief, sure—but not the same sort. He likened it to losing a part of your own brain. Losing entire pieces of his body wasn’t like that. He looked more closely at the panels of births and funerals. Something stirred in the back of his mind. Something else was stirring in the back of the cave.

Around the corner, the small firepit was glowing green and Mother was sitting in front of it. He removed and set down his belt and lightsaber and sat beside her. The flames flickered and for a second he thought he saw something moving in them. The silence didn’t bother him, he was enthralled with the green fire and squinting to figure out exactly what he saw in it.  
“Maul,” she said. She wasn’t in her ceremonial garb, just the red head-covering and a robe.  
“Mother,” he said.  
“I see sleep evades you as well.”  
“More than usual,” she said, flicking some powder into the fire. It shimmered silver in the green and Maul could have sworn he saw a face in it.   
“I thought something might be up in here. I’m having odd dreams...”  
He told her. The fire flickered and maintained.  
“What do you think it means?” Talzin said, looking past the fire and a little too closely at him.  
“I don’t know. To be honest, I’ve been a little stressed over the rest of this rebuild.”  
Stressed. Sure. That was a good way to put this, at least respective to other “stressful” events lately.

She sat in silence, waiting for him to finish thinking.  
“I don’t care anything for sex,” he started slowly. “I just don’t. I never have. I could…produce children, sure. I know how few our numbers are. But it would be entirely duty. Besides, my body was made what it was at birth.”  
“But the gods have given you the gift of choice,” she said. “I see your future in the fires. I can’t tell you this, obviously, but I see it. There are a few outcomes depending on your choice. It’s entirely possible to squander your new freedom, still pulling at ropes that no longer confine you. It’s also possible for you to play a part in restoring balance to Dathomir. You can't do that pandering--you must be sure in yourself. It knows. It feels.”  
“There is definitely something off. I can feel it in my bones.”  
“Tell me, have you not noticed it before? Have you been able to sense balance before this?”

He stopped to think about that. He had been able to do that, but not with this degree of sensitivity.

“You can’t let yourself get tangled in old ropes. Look to the future. What do you care about? What do you want to pursue? Your life is your own. I’m certain you want to exact revenge on that awful man who took you from us. If you succeed, which I think you will, you still have to do something with yourself. What brought you on this path in the first place? What keeps you unsure? I realize the Sith mean nothing to you now, but I feel that the philosophy isn’t entirely useless.”

He thought on that, reciting the code by rote. Thinking about each specific part and how it pertained to the situation. He loved his community fiercely, felt a fire to give back. There was a start. He noticed something he hadn’t before—the intense curiosity of what might have been. Not just what life would have been like growing up normal, but what all he missed here. Dathomir had secrets. One of the reasons Sidious used him was he was voracious in his pursuit of knowledge, particularly knowledge he shouldn’t have. But that pursuit was never for him. The thrill was secondary—the mission, the grand scheme always came first. He could do it entirely for himself now.

“I know what I want to do,” he said, steepling his fingers.  
“Go on,” said Talzin.  
They talked through the particulars over the fire. Talzin saw him smile—the first since he was two years old. 

They eventually walked back to the Big House as the eerie red moon settled--and finally found rest.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm curious what y'all think Maul went with.


End file.
